High Speed Train

In Spain's tranportation competition, hihg speed rail called AVE is winning over airplane. AVE runs 520-kiometer from Madrid and Barcelona just in 2 hours and 38 minutes. Two years ago, nearly 90 percent of 6 million traveling between two cities took airplane. Now, train travelers surpassed fliers.

Experts predicts that eventually all European routes less than 1200-kilometer will be dominated by train travel. Barcelona is 830-kilometer away from Paris.

The winning puch is comfort and convenience. Unlike France with low-cost high speed train image, Spain provides up-scale comfort and conveniences such as assigned reclining seats, computer outlets, movies, headsets, good food, etc. AVE tickets cost as much as plane tickets.

What is more is that train emits less carbone dioxide. Emissions per passenger on a hihg-speed train are about one-fourth of those generated by flying or driving, Analysts say. In Europe, transportation emission grew 26 percent from 1990 to 2007. It is known that aviation emission have grown particularly rapidly.


KTX vs. Domestic Air in Korea

The competition between high speed rail and airplane is also occuring in Korea. Within the peninsular, KTX is winning over airlines. Only in Seoul-Busan, air line is barely surviving, but its future is very much uncertain. KTX carrys 5.9 million passengers annually, which air line 2.3 million. KTX expects its further dominance as it will run in 2:10 hours reducing from the current 2:50 after its completion of line improvement in 2014. KTX is chargin about 50,000 won. Some low-rate air services are entering in to the market with competitable ticket rate, in an anticipation of new transit linkage between the city and airport.

o Nationwide high speed train plan announced 2010. 9. 1.
o The second phase(Daegu-Busan) of Gyungbu high speed train project completed. Its full service open on November 1, 2010, making Seoul-Busan travel time only 2 hour and 10 minutes. 2010. 10. 27.
o A 10-year contruction of airport rail from Seoul Railway Station to Incheon International Airport is completed. The government plans to extend KTX serice to Incheon airport using this rail. 2010. 12. 28.


China High Speed Train

o China has a bold plan to expand its alrealy extensive high speed train lines to neighoring countres and eventually to Europe.

o Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway - Wikipedea 201107

Speedy Trains Transform China

By KEITH BRADSHER New York Times, 2013. 9. 23.

CHANGSHA, China — The cavernous rail station here for China’s new high-speed trains was nearly deserted when it opened less than four years ago.       

Not anymore. Practically every train is sold out, although they leave for cities all over the country every several minutes. Long lines snake back from ticket windows under the 50-foot ceiling of white, gently undulating steel that floats cloudlike over the departure hall. An ambitious construction program will soon nearly double the size of the 16-platform station.

Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.

Li Xiaohung, a shoe factory worker, rides the 430-mile route from Guangzhou home to Changsha once a month to visit her daughter. Ms. Li used to see her daughter just once a year because the trip took a full day. Now she comes back in 2 hours 19 minutes.

Business executives like Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock market in coastal Shenzhen, ride bullet trains to meetings all over China to avoid airport delays. The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early. “I did not think it would change so quickly. High-speed trains seemed like a strange thing, but now it’s just part of our lives,” Mr. Zhen said.

China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering. But it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.

The high-speed rail lines have, without a doubt, transformed China, often in unexpected ways.

For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.

“What we see very clearly is a change in the way a lot of companies are doing business,” said Gerald Ollivier, a World Bank senior transport specialist in Beijing.

Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.

Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.

Li Qingfu, the sales manager at the Changsha Don Lea Ramie Textile Technology Company, an exporter of women’s dresses and blouses, said he used to travel twice a year to Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China. The journey, similar in distance to traveling from Boston to Washington, required nearly a full day in each direction of winding up and down mountains by train or by car.

He now goes almost every month on the punctual bullet trains, which slice straight through the forested mountains and narrow valleys of southern Hunan province and northern Guangdong province in a little over two hours, traversing long tunnels and elevated concrete viaducts in rapid succession.

“More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,” he said.

China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts around high-speed train stations.

The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city dwellers each year to fill New York City, part of a trend visible during a series of visits to the Changsha high-speed train station over the last four years.

When the station opened at the end of 2009 in an inner suburb full of faded state-owned factories, the neighborhood was initially silent. But by 2011, nearly 200 tower cranes could be counted building high-rises during the half-hour drive from downtown Changsha to the high-speed rail station. On a morning last month, only several dozen tower cranes were visible along nearly the same route. But a vibrant new area of apartment towers, commercial office buildings and hotels had opened near the train station.

China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in size to the United States east of the Mississippi.

“Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors” of high population density that China has, said C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people — although the subway line to Changsha’s high-speed train station has been delayed after a deadly tunnel accident, a possible side effect of China’s haste.

New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth. Despite repeated calls by Chinese leaders for a shift to more consumer-led growth, it shows little sign of changing. China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, publicly endorsed further expansion of the 5,900-mile high-speed rail network this summer. He said the country would invest $100 billion a year in its train system for years to come, mainly on high-speed rail.

The Chinese government is already struggling with nearly $500 billion in overall rail debt. Most of it was incurred for the high-speed rail system and financed with bank loans that must be rolled over as often as once a year. Using short-term loans made the financing look less risky on the balance sheets of the state-controlled banking system and held down borrowing costs. But the reliance on short-term credit has left the system vulnerable to any increase in interest rates.

“Even well-performing railways capable of covering their cash running costs and interest on their debt will almost certainly be unable to repay the principal without some long-term financing arrangements,” said a World Bank report last year.

Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.

Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.

The double-digit annual wage increases give the Chinese enough disposable income that domestic airline traffic has still been growing 10 percent a year. That is the second-fastest growth among the world’s 10 largest domestic aviation markets, after India, which now faces a slowdown as the fall of the rupee has made aviation fuel exorbitantly expensive for air carriers there.

High-speed trains are not only allowing business managers from deep inside China to reach bigger markets. They are also prompting foreign executives to look deeper in China for suppliers as wages surge along the coast.

“We always used to have go down south to Guangzhou to meet with European clients, but now they come up to Changsha more often,” said Hwang Yin, a sales executive at the Changsha Qilu Import and Export Company.

The only drawback: “The high-speed trains are getting very crowded these days.”

Hilda Wang contributed reporting.

 

 

US High Speed Train

o Bookings Institution 2010. 8.

o RPA President Robert Yaro' View
Why High Speed Rail is Right
By Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association

Across the water in Great Britain, the new conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has won great attention for his cost-cutting ways as he slashes funding for health care, police, prisons, housing, and even defense.

But one area has remained immune to Cameron’s sharp blade: the country’s emerging high-speed rail system, including the line under development running from London to Birmingham. In fact, Cameron is expanding funding for the system.

Cameron understands what apparently few of his conservative colleagues here do, which is that investing in high-speed rail is part of a sound investment in the country’s future. And while Great Britain is a different country than the United States, its conditions and challenges are not as different as one might think. High-speed rail can work in the United States, as it will in Great Britain.

Over the past month Americans have been offered two starkly divergent views on the role that high-speed rail (HSR) could play in underpinning the mobility system and competitiveness of the United States in the 21st century.

On January 25th, President Obama proposed in his State of the Union Address that the federal government commit $53 billion to building a network of high-speed rail lines that would bring this system within 25 miles of 80% of US residents by 2030. This proposal was part of a broader vision the President outlined for investments in infrastructure, broadband, alternative energy, higher education, and applied research to create a foundation for America’s long-term prosperity and competitiveness.

Then last week, Florida’s new Republican Governor Rick Scott announced that he was cancelling Florida’s HSR project, even though the federal government had agreed to cover 90% of the project’s capital cost and even while competing teams of investors were preparing proposals to cover remaining capital costs in exchange for the opportunity to build, maintain, and operate the system. Scott argued that the project would inevitably require operating subsidies and that the state couldn’t afford to take this risk, given Florida’s already substantial budget deficit. Scott’s actions mirrored those taken last month by the new governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, who also rejected federal HSR funds for their states.

Why America is Different; Why It’s the Same

Reading between the lines, essentially Scott and other HSR critics are arguing the following:

The United States is not Europe. The USA is too sprawling, too spread out, for high-speed rail to ever work. The United States is built around the car and the highway, and to pretend otherwise is to expensively tilt at windmills.

This critique misses the following. Sure, on a gross level, the USA has lots of space and is very low density. But most people in the United States live in megaregions, organized around that other great national infrastructure project, the interstates. Densities in many of these megaregions already surpass European levels.

What are megaregions? They are networks of metropolitan regions stretching from 200-600 miles across with shared economic clusters, infrastructure, and natural systems. It turns out that megaregions are too large to be easily traversed in an automobile, and too small to be efficiently traveled by airplane. In fact, the rest of the industrialized world has already concluded that HSR is the mode of choice in these places.

That’s the first reason HSR can work in the United States.

The second reason is that America is still growing, and needs to direct its growth in sustainable land use patterns, which can be organized around high-speed rail. If the United States commits to full strength high-speed rail in selected megaregions, these places could re-knit around those lines, the same ways these regions formed around the interstates. As HSR lines are built as nodal anchors of robust regional and local transit networks, they have the potential to promote regeneration of older cities and suburbs and accommodate much of the nation’s projected growth.

RPA and its America 2050 program are strong advocates for investing in high-speed rail, both here in the Northeast and in key megaregion corridors. RPA established the America 2050 program in 2005 to promote infrastructure investments the nation will need to accommodate a projected increase of 130 million residents by mid-century. And RPA is leading the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility, which is advocating for HSR development in the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, DC.

Why Megaregions?

Our research has shown that most of the nation’s projected growth will occur in 11 emerging megaregions in every area of the United States. America’s megaregions currently contain 75% of the nation’s population and economic activity. All of these places will have at least 10 million residents by mid-century, and the largest of them, the Northeast megaregion, stretching from Maine to Virginia, will add 18 million additional residents on top of the 52 million already here by 2050.

As most Northeasterners know, much of Interstate 95 between Maine and Virginia is already heavily congested for much of its length, seven days a week. And the I-95 Corridor Coalition forecasts that most of this critical highway corridor will experience gridlock conditions for much of the day within the next generation. In fact, some experts have predicted that if current increases in truck traffic continue, much of the metropolitan interstate system in the Northeast and other megaregions will have no room for automobiles. So if you think your grandchildren will drive or take a cheap bus to get from New York to DC a generation from now, “fuhgettaboutit!” And there are only limited opportunities to widen critical stretches of I-95 since it is bounded by dense urban and suburban development for most of its length.

A similar story exists in the Northeast’s heavily congested airspace, and in its airports. While expanding the airport capacity is still necessary, high-speed rail would provide another route for medium-range travelers and give the overall transportation system in the Northeast more flexibility and needed redundancy.

It is important to note that high-speed rail works only in megaregions – and, further, all megaregions are not equally suited to HSR service. To identify where HSR makes the most sense, America 2050 has produced two major research reports, titled Where High Speed Rail Works Best (2009) and High Speed Rail for America (issued in 2011) which identify criteria that should be used to prioritize HSR routes. These reports conclude that high-speed rail makes the most sense in the Northeast, California, the Chicago Hub region of the Midwest, Florida, and a handful of other places.

The View from Abroad

Ten European and four Asian countries have already built extensive HSR networks. The European Union is planning to expand its HSR network to include the rest of central and eastern Europe, and several developing countries –including India, Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, Morocco, and others-- are also planning or building their own HSR systems.

Some commentators have suggested that only socialist or authoritarian countries such as China are building these systems. But as the actions of Prime Minister Cameron show, countries such as the United Kingdom, with conservative, market-oriented leadership, are moving forward with HSR investments. The long-term mobility and economic benefits of HSR are far too great to abandon the program.

In Britain, as in Japan and several other countries, these projects are being pursued as Public-Private Partnerships (“P3s”) in which private investors are providing a quarter or more of the total capital costs, and projects are running on a break-even or profit-making basis under private management. This is a line of action that has not been fully explored or explained in the press or within most political debate.

What matters is that when fully realized, a national network of HSR routes serving the nation’s megaregions, including the Northeast, has the potential to provide the same kind of backbone for a 21st century national mobility system that the interstate highways did in the late 20th century. In so doing, it could provide a foundation for a dramatic expansion of the economy of most of the country, underpinning America’s competitiveness and livability for decades, as the Interstates have over the past half century.

These investments must, of course, be complemented by new capacity in key highway corridors, airports, seaports, broadband, water, and other infrastructure systems. But along with these other investments, HSR could create a framework for metropolitan and megaregion growth and development that will allow us to compete successfully with the other industrialized and industrializing countries now making similar investments.

Growing the Future

Given the setbacks HSR has had in Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio, it may seem like a lost cause. But it is important to put those setbacks in perspective.

Several times before in American history - beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s national development plan in 1808 - American presidents have produced visions like the one promoted by President Obama for the nation’s future infrastructure development, usually organized around the latest cutting-edge transportation technology. For Jefferson, it was canals; for Lincoln it was railroads; and for Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower it was limited-access highways. In virtually every case, nay-sayers and political detractors fought these investments, and in some cases delayed their implementation by decades. In every case, however, these visions were largely realized, often a generation or more after first being proposed.

Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for a national limited-access highway system, for example, which he first put forward in 1938, took 18 years to be realized. And that only happened when President Dwight Eisenhower embraced the idea. Even Ike had trouble convincing a reluctant Republican Congress to enact a gas tax to pay for his proposed National Defense Highway Act. (And this only happened when Ike cloaked the idea in the national defense concept.) And when they did finally pass this legislation, the Congress cut the amount of the President’s proposed gas tax so that it was not adequate to build Ike’s envisioned coast-to-coast interstate system.

Only when portions of the system began to be built did broad public support force Congress to enact the additional gas taxes needed to complete the President’s bold vision. We all know how the story ends, with the Interstates being completed over 30 years and their subsequent transformation of the nation’s landscape and economy over the next 60 years. Ironically, although the National Defense Interstate Highway System was never used in the nation’s defense, it did underpin a five-fold increase in GDP after 1956 that enabled the US to sustain the defense budgets needed to win the Cold War.

America is poised for a transformation of similar magnitude, underpinned by a series of nationwide networks of high-speed rail lines focused within megaregions. It may take a generation or longer for President Obama’s vision to be realized, but the process has begun. There will be setbacks along the way, like the one last week in Florida, but with the support of people of good will, who care about the nation’s future, it will happen.


HIGH SPEED RAIL IN METROPOLITAN AREA

Seoul Metropolitan Area
o High speed rail called for Seoul metropolitan area A - JoongAng Daily 2013. 07.
o High speed rail called for Seoul metropolitan area B - JoongAng Daily 2013. 07.